Run, Naked Dude, Run
Monday, February 7th, 2005 at 3:59 pm
This weekend, I finally had a chance to see Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, winner of all kinds of acclaim when it came out in 2002. That it takes three years for amazing films like this to screen in the country’s fifth largest city is one of my most frequent Philly frustrations. Film at International House and The Fabric Workshop are definitely two of the most forward-thinking arts programs in the city, and they deserve credit for their current collaboration, Experiments With Truth, which finally brought Atanarjuat to town.
The film is gorgeous from start to finish, alternating between blue and white arctic landscapes and orange-black, fire-lit interior and night scenes. The plot line is essentially a classical heroic epic with brothers, lovers, rivals, elders, love, violence, murder, rape, cheating, good and evil, etc. The richness of the tale illustrates just how far mainstream cinema has gotten from the basics of storytelling. You don’t need me to tell you that most of the films screening at your mutliplex are all visual candy with nothing human to hang on to. There are few contrivances in Atanarjurat, unless you consider violence, static cameras, removed locales and props to be contrivances. Much of the action is everyday and mundane (at least for the Inuit). Tearing apart and eating meat is a recurring image – which serves both as an illustration of the difficulty of survival and a nice mirror for the human-on-human brutality in the film. And finally, I’ll put the chase scene across ice floes up against that car chase on San Francisco hills in Steve McQueen’s Bullitt as one of the greatest of all time.
Related: Libby Rosof was there, too
